Watch and Wait (Midweek Message)

Reinhold Niebuhr

               

                                                         H. Richard Niebuhr

Watch and Wait

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

December 3, 2019

“Watch, stand fast in faith, be brave, be strong” (1 Corinthians 16:13).

“Keep your clothing hitched up, ready, and keep your lamps lit.  You yourselves be like servants who wait for their master, when he will return from the wedding, that when he comes and knocks they may open to him immediately. Blessed are those servants whom the master, when he comes, will find watching ” (Luke 12:35-36).

“Watch and pray, to avoid being put to the test.  Intentions may be good, but follow-through is hard” (Matthew 26:41).

A parishioner recently said to me, “I can’t watch the news any more.  It just makes me angry.  It just makes me realize how helpless I am, how hopeless things are.”  Hopeless and helpless: these emotions often precede people withdrawing, disengaging, and hunkering down depressed and alone.    Such isolation, though, just makes matters worse—people not challenging the broken status quo, not calling people to account, not framing hope for a better, different world just encourages the brokenness of things to continue and grow.  Hopelessness encourages further helplessness.    

In 1932, Imperial Japan had just invaded China and brutally taken over Manchuria.  Everyone could see that this presaged overall war in East Asia.  Some argued for military intervention to assist the Chinese, but this did not go anywhere because an honest assessment saw that such intervention had little chance of success and only would make the bloodshed and suffering worse.  So most people just said “in the face of this hopeless situation, we must do nothing, precisely because it is hopeless.”  People passed resolutions condemning the Japanese aggression and brutality of the occupation, in particular medical experiments on Chinese prisoners.  But all knew that such resolutions would change nothing, and in fact, only increased the hopelessness. 

In response, H. Richard Niebuhr wrote an article in the progressive Christian Century entitled, “The Grace of Doing Nothing.”  For him, in situations when nothing helpful can be done by anyone, there are different ways of “doing nothing.” Most feed the hopeless situation, but one actually might make a difference.    Pessimistic inaction feeds the horror by letting it go on unchallenged.  A “conservative” or “realist” inaction feeds it by saying that such horror is the way of all nations and nothing we can do will change this.   But the inactivity of a moral person frustrated and angry over the horror is something else entirely.  Such an objector, unable to use violence or threat of violence to change things, either because of its likely failure or because you renounce the tools of the broken world, challenges and questions the wrong all the same.  This inactivity is not meaningless.  A secular objector has hope that in the long arc of history, public naming and shaming of evil will eventually win the day once the processes of history work to unveil the deep contradictions in the violence of the system.  A Christian objector, on the other hand, has faith that God will eventually intervene and bring about the eschatological “Reign of God” hoped for in apocalyptic thought, and that ongoing witness to this in the here and now, rather than not accomplishing anything, actually keeps alive the hope that will be part of the arrival of the hoped for Kingdom.   

R. Richard’s brother, Reinhold Neibuhr, wrote a response to the article agreeing with the idea that both kinds of hopeful inaction may make a difference, but questioning his brother’s idealism in hoping against hope that eschatological consummation alone will heal the brokenness of our world.   How can we say that our anger and frustration at evil are tools in God’s hands but at the same time say that God forbids us to use them in any effective way?  No, Reinhold says:  it is better to use, carefully and ethically, the processes of history and the tools of nations to minimize harm, injustice, and bloodshed, even as a complete image of how things ought to be remains veiled from our eyes in this broken world. 

H. Richard’s position has been at the heart of Christian pacifism ever since, while Reinhold’s was the argument that later persuaded Dietrich Bonhoeffer to join the July 20, 1944 failed plot to assassinate Hitler.   Reinhold’s realism lies behind much of the hopeful activism of such leaders as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Sojourners’ Jim Wallis.   

As a student of Buddhism, I learned in taiqi the importance of lifting your weight off a leg and foot, and using absence of weight and of effort as a tool in the struggle of balance that occurs in any physical confrontation.  In meditation, I learned that emptying one’s mind was the ultimate presence.  And as a U.S. diplomat, I learned the importance of strategic inaction as a tool in advancing one’s national interests.   Though derided in the West as lazy, laissez-faire, not-so-benign neglect, or mere ineptitude, strategic inaction is a key element of theory behind Sunzi’s Art of War.  The Chinese Taoist proverb says it all:

无为而治

Do nothing, but accomplish everything. 

Watching and waiting are scriptural tag words that explain how we should approach the fulfilment of our hopes.   Watching implies intentionality, clear witness, and keeping awake and engaged.  Waiting implies strategic inaction.  We are now in Advent, a season that looks forward to the fulfilment of God’s promises.  The basic message of Advent is don’t lose hope, and don’t let helplessness make you give up on doing what’s right. 

Grace and Peace. 

Fr. Tony+